1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to matching user descriptions of technical problem manifestations with system level descriptions.
2. Description of Background
Currently, many small businesses are managing their information technology (IT) infrastructure without the aid of a dedicated IT staff with detailed knowledge of their software and hardware solutions. “IT-responsible” people are people who are primarily business application users who also perform IT tasks only as a secondary part of their jobs. Such people view application software stacks as a single solution rather than as component parts. They expect these solutions to be capable of being managed and analyzed as a single entity. Often, solutions consist of a number of distinct products and dozens of logs located throughout the system. Existing technology does not fully meet the needs of the type of relatively low skilled IT user typically found in this market. One area where this is especially true is in helping IT-responsible users troubleshoot application problems experienced by other business users in the company.
IT-responsible persons in small businesses are the “go-to” people when another business user has any sort of technical problem. The types of issues which business users have can vary significantly from basic application usage to complete system failure, and an IT-responsible person must attempt to deal with all of those types of issues. Today, most IT-responsible persons use artifacts such as POST-IT™ Notes or MS WORD™ documents to store troubleshooting knowledge which they acquire through experience over time. Other common sources of troubleshooting knowledge referenced by IT-responsible persons are sites such as GOOGLE™, YAHOO™, or product vendor support sites.
However, there are major issues with respect to the current situation for small businesses. For an example of such an issue, an IT-responsible person must try to use a business user's verbal description of the business user's problem as the basis for researching how to solve the problem. Because IT-responsible persons typically lack in-depth knowledge of the complete software/hardware solution, it is extremely difficult for them to understand how problems down in the software/hardware stack may be manifested in the behavior of the business applications used in the office.
Another such issue arises in the chain of communication as problems and user or system actions are summarized verbally or textually and passed between people. Much like the old parlor game in which someone whispers a sentence into your ear and you pass it around the room to see how much it has changed by the time it gets back to the person who started the game, as information is transferred and restated between parties, meanings and phrases can be lost or distorted after only a single transfer of information.
There are presently a number of different software-based trouble ticketing or service request applications on the market. However, the level of formality around the process of such applications, such as requiring the user to open a trouble ticket, put it in a queue, check out the trouble ticket, etc., rarely, if ever, serves to increase the effectiveness of an IT-responsible person in performing the troubleshooting task. Rather, the IT-responsible person needs intelligent assistance from the software/hardware solution stack in understanding how the business user's problem does or does not relate to the componentry of the overall solution. For example, the IT-responsible person needs to understand if it is only a simple user error, such as typing a password with the capslock on, or if it is something more insidious on the server side, such as the LDAP server being down. The use of intelligent analysis of business user problem descriptions can provide IT-responsible persons with a powerful tool for helping to efficiently and effectively deal with IT tasks, which are the most common but least product-supported tasks for a typical business.